Jeff Koons

If you’re the type to stop and smell the roses you probably have some appreciation for the natural world. Unfortunately, in this age of technology, less and less people take time to connect with our natural surroundings, which makes the works we’re featuring here so important. The works of Jeff Koons, Ackroyd and Harvey, Binh Danh and Portia Munson all take plant-life and re-contextualize it; the viewer is faced with something familiar cast in a new light. In the cases of Koons and Ackroyd and Harvey, the scale of their works looms over the viewer to remind them that the nature of all things are continually evolving, even that of human civilization. With Portia Munson’s Garden installations, we literally walk into a new world that is groomed yet overgrown, familiar yet psychedelic. Binh Danh’s plant-based portraits balance the fragile surface of the leaves with the powerful imagery of the victims of the 1970’s Cambodian unrest. Though the works are largely different, one thing binds them together, the power of nature to communicate a feeling and a message without words.

Binh Danh

Confront the natural world in your living room with Woolly Pocket. Woolly Pocket lets you transform spaces, making vertical gardens easy to install and maintain. . Our favorite aspect of Woolly Pocket is their Woolly School Gardens project that connect schools looking to start a garden with community members looking to support their efforts. Help kids give nature new meaning  by visiting Woolly School Garden and find a school near you to sponsor.

 
Woolly Pocket

Portia Munson

Portia Munson

Woolly Pocket

Ackroyd and Harvey

Ackroyd and Harvey

Woolly Pocket

Jeff Koons

Originally from Armenia, artist Ana Bagayan studied illustration at California’s Art Center College of Design. Her many paintings and drawings are populated with doll-like youths and human-alien hybrids, showcasing the artist’s special interest in the metaphysical. In particular, many of her hybrid creatures were inspired by the stories told by avowed alien abductees while under hypnosis. Bagayan’s drawings and paintings have been displayed in galleries across the US, including most recently at Thinkspace Gallery in Culver City, California. Take a look at more metaphysical marvels after the jump.

Michael Jason Enriquez’s (an Advertising student at Art Center College of Design) Cholafied comes from the mind of an LA kid who grew up in the 90′s. It’s a throwback to Chola gangster style: Sharpied eyebrows, dark lipliner, and the fumes from a can of Aqua Net. It’s a product of LA where subcultures, celebrity obsession, street art, and stupidity are rolled up together like one of those bacon wrapped hot dogs sold on Hollywood Blvd.

Things can get jumbled up living in LA. It can be very glossy and image based. The many subcultures in the city are a reflection of wanting a sense of belonging in what some consider a very lonely city. This is a town where icons are manufactured. We have the Kardashians, American Idol, and Lindsay Lohan. We root for these people, we rally behind them, and then we beat them up to see if they can stand back up again, like jumping them into a gang.

Cholafied tries to capture as many different fandoms as possible on the site. Tumblr is perfect for this because people in the different fan bases reblog and ‘like’ the same things between each other. There is a group mentality that draws an odd parallel to gangs. So Cholafied labels a cultural icon a chola, gives them a chola look, and then jumps them into a gang of ridiculousness by posting them on the site.

Pepa Prieto’s work represents a private world of invented characters and imagined environments. For Pepa, this is the equivalent of a visual diary where she can freely explore the world of relationships and their consequences. In order to do this, she creates circumstances and fictional landscapes that take both the viewer and the inhabitants of her paintings on challenging and diverse journeys.

The formal aspects of her works are intuitive and are reflected most clearly in the areas that she paints with a playful, lose gesture. She balance’s the compositions in her work by combining these painterly areas with more abstract geometrical forms.  In Pepa’s work, she seeks to create an inner, personal conversation with the hope inspiring reflection on the part of the viewer as well.

The best thing about the photographs of Jamie Trueblood is that although they appear to be staged they are in fact  documentary style photos of the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, and most often weird events that take place each and every day across America. Trueblood has a natural ability to pinpoint moments of awkward beauty in the everyday and find secret narratives in the mundane occurrences that we all come across as we live our lives.

Until recently I was unfamiliar with the artist Alex Ebstein, but I am glad to have rectified my lack of awareness.  There is an honesty to Ebstein’s work that I find readily engaging.  The use of yarn or string in an artist’s practice can often shift the aesthetic towards a decidedly crafty end result, but Ebstein manages to use the material with such purpose that it might as well be a drawn line in an architectural blue print.  The effectiveness of the work hinges on her ability to merge direct compositional tactics with a more playful approach to the selected materials.  Ebstein’s use of string also elevates the intentionality of her mark marking, and then quickly reasserts itself as a method of creating illusory depth in what would otherwise be relatively flat pieces.  Taught angular moments combined with purposefully relaxed textures start a visual conversation that I am more than happy to participate in.

I could have just included the ‘eye chart’ pieces because I found them extremely aesthetically pleasing, but the back-story provides a bit of insight that I think most would enjoy.  Think of it as a ‘Director’s Commentary’ for the work.  Courtesy of Miss Ebstein, “…then for the eye chart pieces. They are more of a weird reflection on (and obsession with) eyesight and my existing eye problems that force me to visit the doctor every month. I’ve had four eye surgeries in three years… I am always nervously checking my vision against things, one eye at a time, so these drawings were kind of my own dark humored joke about being an artist and constantly worrying about my vision.”  I am of the belief that ‘going blind’ is one of (if not) the most terrifying things any artist could imagine, and I appreciate the candor with which she addresses what could be an immobilizing reality to those with a more pessimistic outlook on life.  Ebstein will be starting grad school this fall, and I am eager to see how this focused environment will affect her work.  I also encourage anyone interested in contemporary art to check out the consistently interesting programming at Nudashank – a gallery she co-runs with Seth Adelsberger in the Baltimore area.

Italian artist Mauro Perucchetti’s pop sculptures take jabs at everything from Barack Obama to religious ideology (see angry Jesus on the cross after the jump). Working in a large range of mediums from hand carved marble (like the above Batman & Superman sculpture) to cast resin, Perucchetti’s work has the perfect mixture of ironic wit and social critique.

Jamie Vasta’s  masterfully accomplished paintings may look like traditional chiaroscuro but they are in fact covered in shiny, shimmering glitter. Vasta has taken the painterly arts to new altitudes with her paintings in glitter. Her insouciant medium is fine-tuned to accentuate narrative.

Here series After Caravaggio, a contemporary reframing of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio‘s historic paintings in homage to the great master on the 400th anniversary of his death, (1573 – 1610). Vasta gathers friends and colleagues as muse for her ambitious recasting of Caravaggio’s famous paintings. In rethinking such paintings as Giuditte e Oloferne, 1599, and Deposizione, 1602, Vasta composed her coterie with the props of today, turning gender, dress, and environment on end. The intention of the original comes forward, no heraldry of aristocracy, but an emancipation of the peasantry, under hot theater lights of course.